The Real Story Behind TheOneRing.Net

Regular subscribers to Scoop may have noticed an article
by Kevin Loughlin about the founders of Tolkien website
TheOneRing.net - that is, about myself and Mike Regina.

I
found it an interesting read in that it was basically a pack
of lies as far as it concerned us, and when we confronted
Kevin with this fact, he said in an email to Mike that he
was just exercising "journalistic license."

In that case
I'll exercise my own journalistic license and state the
following factoids without bothering to verify any of
them:

Kevin is a New Zealand PR person who arrived in
Montreal a few days back, heard an interview with Mike about
TheOneRing.net, and wrote the article which he sent to
Scoop. I'm looking at the transcript of the TV interview
right now and it bears only a passing resemblance to
Kevin's article.

Odd that a Kiwi wouldn't think of
calling home to check out who I was.

"Two years ago he
[Mike] created the official web site for Lord of the Rings
fans, during an on line liaison with a young New Zealand
woman in Wellington."

Kevin assumes that I'm a young woman
from Wellington. While I can probably beat most of my
colleagues over a flat mile, this is not the same as being
young.

Nor am I very frequently around Wellington, being
a member of the Auckland Philharmonia. Most confusing is the
statement that Mike and I met while conducting an online
liaison. What exactly is that supposed to mean?

That Mike
is interested in older women? That I hang around in sleazy
chatrooms looking for young film students? The real story is
far more interesting than that - not that Kevin found out,
as he next asserted that Mike "has no idea who I
am."

After more than two years of writing, chatting,
arguing, planning and plotting together every day, that's
hardly the case.

Here is the real story of TORN, as I see
it.

Firstly, Mike has always had a deep love and knowledge
of film, and I came across a posting of his on a forum on
AICN (aint-it-cool-news.com) which interested me, as it
concerned a James Cameron project based on books we both
like. Now, at that time I was a technophobe (not much has
changed since then) and only I bought a computer in order
to write faster. I almost never surfed the Net, and coming
across 'Xoanon' (Mike) was the result of a rare
flutter-board excursion onto the Net to read an interview
with Peter Jackson about the LOTR film project. The chances
against me encountering Mike were astronomical.

Mike's
net-savvy and has a flair for PR, so the idea of starting a
LOTR website came naturally to him; meanwhile I love hiking,
so I did as much legwork as possible here in NZ to get
information and photos for the website. Not much at first -
just general images on NZ to give the world an idea, but
they were surprisingly well-received. Also in the first few
months when there were more rumours than facts, it was
helpful having a Kiwi acting as a bullshit-detector. For
instance, it wasn't immediately obvious to people in the
States that the 'Kylie Minogue will play Galadriel' rumour
was a wind-up. The website exploded in popularity,
especially after Calisuri and Corvar approached us and
persuaded us to dream on a much larger scale.

TheOneRing
as it now exists came about when the four of us joined
forces. Cali told us frankly that our webpage design sucked,
and he was a webpage designer - a very good one, it turned
out. He's also got an entrepreneurial streak a mile wide.

Meanwhile Corvar could help us get a domain name and look
after running the servers and the invisible stuff that
maintains the website.

Of all of us, Corvar's never
mentioned or interviewed or anything, and yet he's the
anchor. He's the guy who throws a bucket of water over us
when we get 'too hasty', the guy who knows how business and
money works, and the one person who never seems to lose his
head or have trouble telling between right and wrong.

The
thing about running the website is that we're immensely
competitive, in exactly the way that sports are competitive
- or music, for that matter.

We want to be first and best
with the news, for no other reason than the sheer challenge
of doing it and doing it as well as we can. And there are
enough other LOTR websites out there with the same attitude
that we're forced to compete. It makes no difference to the
human condition who is best at anything, or who wins a
competition. There is no earthly reason to care, either in
sport or the Net. However the fact remains: We're a team,
we want to be the best, and Corvar stops us from biting
other Tolkien website's ears off or headstomping them too
often.

I don't know whether we run a Tolkien website only
because we're Tolkien fans or because it also provides the
best possible sandpit to play in.

Curiously we play a game
with rules that we pretty much have to make up.

What is
fair? What is ethical journalism? People are always pushing
the boundaries of copyright, truthfulness, fair
play....snatching content and images off other websites,
mounting campaigns against websites who do it to them...
it's immensely entertaining. At the end of the day, everyone
wants to end up still with a website and still playing, so
there's a general tendency towards fair play, though it's
arrived at with a deal of conflict.

I find that
interesting, because by its nature you would expect the Net
to be completely anarchic.

Among the many things that rile
me are the fact (and yes, this is a fact, not something I'm
making up because it happens to be Thursday) that we've
developed TheOneRing.net in the spirit of a game, and that
to play the game we had to find rules, and because we didn't
know what the rules for ethical journalism are, we asked
journalists.

That is the beginning and end of my training
in journalism, and I can't tell you how many juicy stories
we've sat on because it seemed to us that we simply didn't
have both sides of the story, or one side was clearly lying.
In other cases where we simply didn't know, we said we could
only guess the truth.

Kevin's article reiterated the TV
interview's assertion that we'd 'joined forces with New
Line' without questioning it. That factoid was out of Mike's
control - the TV interviewer put the words in his mouth, and
I can hardly blame Kevin for believing them.

Kevin takes
it further and says that we're the OFFICIAL website for LOTR
fans. Their words imply that somehow we and New Line are
playing on the same field. How can we be? TORN is run by
about 30 fans, for the benefit of millions more, and passes
its profits on to charities since we realised there was no
fair way to rule on how to divide up our earnings; New Line
is a huge corporation so enormous that one section of it can
be serving me with a trespass notice while another part of
it is figuring out how we can help their publicity.
Meanwhile other parts of it seems genuinely grateful for our
reporting.

New Line's security people probably
overestimated my effectiveness as a spy, and as a result
I'll always be known as the chief spy in NZ. These days news
pretty much just comes to us via fans- though keeping track
of it all is a huge job.

Arguably our existence generates
spying and therefore news but sure as tomorrow's sunrise, if
we didn't exist some other website would have expanded to
fill our niche in the nerdosphere.

If TORN seems to be
nothing but news and images from Peter Jackson's films, it's
because you don't see the fantastic grab-bag of email we get
besides. One might be a frothing rant from somebody who
wants to shout abuse at Peter Jackson, but I'll do as a
substitute (and by the way, could I forward them JRRT's
email?), the next email might talk about Victorian
fairy-tales, and another one ask me to think about faceless
evil and the centrality of moral choice in Tolkien's work,
the next says 'Cool armour on those orcs!!! Do you think
there'll be LOTs of BLOOD????'

After two years of it I
still wouldn't like to define what is an 'average Tolkien
fan.'

I am, as I've said, a technophobe. I would resent
every minute I spend on the computer when I could be out
doing something I can lay my hands on, except that these
correspondents are so damned ingenious and varied, and so
generous with their stories. It feels like Christmas every
time I open the connection. Perhaps that is the true story
of TORN: everything in your life can hinge on one stranger
chance-met on the road. And the road goes ever
onwards....

A 22 year
old Canadian who acknowledges he's a Lord of the Rings nerd,
says global on-line interest in the imaginary world of
Hobbits, Orcs, Wizards and Elfs is colossal, with the New
Zealand made movie production of J R R Tolkien's epic
adventure trilogies, already destined to be bigger than the
entire Star Wars series.

Michael Regina, a computer
networking student of Pointe-Claire in Montreal Canada, read
JRR Tolkiens trilogy in High School, and loved it. Two years
ago he created the official web site for Lord of the Rings
fans, during an on line liaison with a young New Zealand
woman in Wellington.

"She casually mentioned about a huge
movie project called Lord of the Rings, that was being
filmed not far from where she lived. I asked her to send any
available photos, and she did. As a result theonering.net
was created. In two years we've had almost 235 million hits
and everytime there's a new release such as the current
movie trailer, or a giant poster, the numbers just
skyrocket," Regina said.

Recently theonering.net which
also lists itself as the Official Peter Jackson web-site,
pre-empted cinemas throughout North America when it began
screening the movie's trailer on line. The trailer is being
shown in many cinemas at regular screenings of Pearl Harbor.
Initial reaction by fans has been almost fanatical. The
movie's profile is also increasing rapidly as a result of
numerous feature articles appearing in many major US and
Canadian metropolitan newspapers and specialist
publications.

"Nobody makes any money because we give it
all away to charity. The movie's producers, New Line Cinema,
thought I did a good job, so they approached me to join
forces with them. A fan section, discussion forms, and spy
reports have also been created, to provide other options of
interest," Regina said.

For his efforts Michael Regina has
received various items of gear worn by crew members, copies
of the scripts, and he's had a chance to chat with some of
the stars including Liv Tyler. He has no idea who the young
New Zealand woman is who gave him the inspiration and the
photos to help create the web-site. He acknowledges he
simply got lucky, through talking to her on the
Net.

Meanwhile, six months out from its world premiere,
the $US270 million New Line production of Lord of the Rings
is looking safe to be an absolute goldmine for investors.
Already more than 420million hits have been recorded on the
official web-site, while a record 2.1 million downloads of
the trailer were taken in the first weekend of its release.

Film crews in the United States and Canada agree that
Lord of the Rings is the most colossal movie production ever
embarked upon, that it will be a bigger hit than Star Wars,
and they expêct it to be an even bigger cash cow, than both
Star Wars and James Bond, combined. There's respectful
comment, from those who are working on other block busters
currently in production, that crews involved in our film
industry, are highly professional. A fact evident in this
latest Kiwi made production.

Lord of the Rings will be
released in three sectors, one each December, over the next
three years. "Fellowship of the Ring" will open on a record
10,000 screens globally on 19 December 2001. It's impact on
New Zealand's future movie industry, and the Wellington
region, is sure to be absolutely, positively,
golden.

Pearl Harbor opens nationwide in New Zealand
cinemas this week. Audiences can expect to see the trailer
for Fellowship of the Ring, when they attend the sessions.

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